Cartoonist Kim Deitch places himself and his wife Pam—a passionate collector of Halloween cats from the 1920s and 30s—at the center of this graphic novel. But when Pam buys a mysterious old cat costume, she and Kim find themselves in wholly new territory: the lost world of Alias the Cat, a figure who, in 1915, appeared not only in a comic strip and film serial, but also in real life as a freedom-fighting superhero. And throughout oddly intersecting stories about stranded seamen and the secret lover of Alias's alter ego Malek Janochek, Deitch's personal nemesis Waldo the Cat makes antagonistic appearances.

"Followers of premier underground comics creator Deitch's long career know how hopeless it's been for him to expunge Waldo, the evil blue cat that only he and other deranged characters can see, from his cartooning—and his life. The malignant feline bedeviled the hero of The Boulevard of Broken Dreams, and Deitch's new book concerns several others so cursed, Deitch himself foremost among them. He and his wife are inveterate collectors of pop-cultural detritus. Her passion for cat kitsch and his for silent movies intersect when they find, buy, and mysteriously lose a (gulp!) Waldo doll, and, thanks to her winning an eBay auction for an ancient cat costume, he then discovers a 1915 comic-strip-and-movie serial, left incomplete by its creator's bizarre death. The costume was worn in the film version, in which the shadow of cat ears—Waldo's ears!—fleetingly appears. In the final, third episode of a wild ride punctuated by wilder side trips to fill in the backstory, Deitch repairs to Midgetville, New Jersey, to face down his nemesis. He does not emerge unscathed. Deitch's parody of the hard-boiled sleuther is gloriously ludicrous yet as involving as a Philip Marlowe caper, and his boldly cartoonish artwork, packed with ambient detail and full of blockish, weighty figures (they could all be heavies), is the perfect medium for it."—Booklist (starred review)